An earthquake and aftershocks in remote northeastern Afghanistan this week may have killed several thousand people and left thousands more injured and homeless, Afghan officials and international relief agencies said yesterday as the first sketchy reports of the disaster began reaching the West.
The quake, measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale, struck on Wednesday night in a hilly region of mud homes and farming villages around Rustaq, a city of 10,000 in the northeastern Province of Takhar, 200 miles north of the Afghan capital of Kabul, relief officials in the region and in New York said.
With the area caught in harsh winter snows and isolated by topography and the effects of the protracted Afghan civil war, relief teams by yesterday had not reached places where many were believed buried in landslides and the rubble of collapsed homes. Officials said the teams might not reach the stricken area before tomorrow.
Thus, United Nations officials and some relief agencies cautioned against immediate acceptance of reports of widespread destruction and heavy losses of life, especially because the region is so sparsely populated. Though the casualty figures seemed to be little more than estimates, various reports agreed that a major quake had struck.
Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of the rebel alliance that controls the province and that has fought a protracted civil war against the fundamentalist Taliban Islamic Government in Kabul, said yesterday that as many as 4,000 people had been killed, and that the quake had destroyed 20 villages, including 6 large ones, and had left up to 15,000 people homeless.
Other reports cited lower tolls. Radio Shariat, the Taliban station in Kabul, said 3,350 were dead, while television reports from neighboring Iran put the combined dead and injured at 1,000. Agence France-Presse quoted Kabul officials of the International Red Cross as saying 3,000 had died, while the Afghan Red Crescent Society said 2,780 were dead and thousands more injured.
In a joint statement in Geneva, the Red Cross and the Red Crescent said relief teams had been dispatched yesterday from Kabul to assess the extent of casualties and damage and to set up makeshift hospitals and shelters for the quake's victims.
In New York, Juan Carlos Brandt, a spokesman for United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, said its relief efforts were being coordinated through aid offices in Islamabad, Pakistan and Dushanbe, in Tajikistan, 100 miles north of the earthquake.
Afghanistan is a mountainous, thinly populated and landlocked country wedged between Pakistan on the east, Iran on the west and, on the north by several former Soviet states: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Afghan civil war has crippled the nations' communications and other infrastructure and left tens of thousands dead.
About 15 or 20 percent of the country, in the north, is controlled by the alliance under President Rabbani, who fled Kabul when the capital was seized by Taliban forces in September 1996. The Taliban control the rest of the country to the south.
Sher Mohammed, a spokesman for the alliance controlling the stricken area, said the quake had devastated an area around Rustaq, including villages called Guzar Darra and Ganda Chashma. ''The hills collapsed into each other, making a huge crater in the earth,'' he said.
The Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was reported to have ordered his forces to halt all military operations against the alliance on the Takhar Province front, while President Rabbani, head of the opposition, expressed ''shock and grief'' and asked all Afghans to observe a day of mourning today for the victims of the quake.
Mr. Rabbani's communique said temperatures in the stricken area were below freezing, and aid officials said heavy recent snows had compounded the misery of those left injured and homeless.
Christian Guntern, a Red Cross official in Kabul, said his organization's relief team would carry tents to provide temporary shelter for the victims.
The United States Geological Survey in Golden, Colo., said the initial earthquake had struck at 7:37 P.M., local time, Wednesday, and had been measured at 6.1 on the Richter scale.
It was not an unusually big quake, but enough -- especially with many aftershocks -- to cause considerable destruction in communities of poorly constructed houses. In 1991, a quake with a magnitude of 6.5 killed an estimated 900 people in remote mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.
United Nations relief officials in New York said their closest office to the scene of the disaster was in Faizabad, 40 miles east of Rustaq, and said a team traveling by road was not likely to reach the area before tomorrow, partly because of the difficulty of crossing snowy mountain passes. Another team was leaving from Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
United Nations officials also were considering the possibility of using helicopters to fly in teams to make a quick assessment of the needs, but an airlift by plane was considered impractical: the nearest airstrip was about 40 miles away from the quake scene, in the provincial capital of Taloqan, they said.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan said his country would also mobilize relief supplies for the quake victims. Aid workers in Pakistan said they had little information on the extent of casualties or damage.
A map caption on Saturday about an earthquake in Afghanistan misstated the location of Takhar Province, where the earthquake struck. It is in northeastern, not northwestern, Afghanistan.